Our modern-day Mrs. Claus shares her favorite holiday memories — of gumdrops, treasured gifts, and lopsided trees.Wonder what the other celeb chefs serve for the holidays? Check out these 50 holiday recipes from star chefs.

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"It don't matter what we do, so long as we're all together": That recipe for a wonderful Christmas comes to you from Paula Deen — doyenne of down-home cooking, Food Network host with that remarkably rich twang, and head of a growing (and unapologetically Southern-fried) lifestyle empire.

It's that expanding enterprise that keeps Deen away from her Savannah home six months of the year, by her count. Which means that in recent years, she's had to cut some Christmas preparation awfully close to the big day. "Last year, I was left with just six days to get ready," she says, sitting in a New York City hotel suite, sharing a pot of coffee and a stack of molasses cookies ("Ya gotta dip one, really soak it in the coffee — mmm!") with me; her younger son, Bobby; and her husband, Michael Groover.

Just as she is on TV, in person Deen is ebullient and loquacious — so prone to never leave out the smallest detail (a habit just as valuable to bakers as to storytellers) that the family refers to soft-spoken Groover's rendition of certain stories as "the USA Today version." Here, she shares some of her favorite holiday memories — and her most irresistible cookie recipes. And be warned: You will be very, very hungry when you finish reading these tales of a Paula Deen holiday.

A Taste of Christmas Past

Not surprisingly, some of Deen's earliest and most magical Christmas memories involve food. But instead of sugarplums dancing in her head, there were gumdrop trees. During her childhood in Albany, GA, her mother, Corrie Hiers, would take a thistle bush and stick gumdrops on the ends of its thorny branches — a tradition Deen always adored.

Every winter growing up, she knew that the holidays were getting close based on one special treat emerging from the oven. "Every year my Grandmother Paul would make the Japanese fruitcake — how it got that name, I don't know — and Mama used to make it, too. I always knew when I saw it that Christmas was only a few days away." This confection was "alternating layers of spice and yellow cake, with filling of pineapple and coconut and maraschino cherries, and nothing like the traditional fruitcake we think of," she recalls almost dreamily. Deen still makes the cake but lately has been adding a layer of divinity frosting. "There's no telling how many calories are in that cake! Michael says it's too sweet. I say, 'Are you out of your mind?'" she says with mock indignation.

Of course, presents hold a treasured place in her memories, too: Deen particularly remembers the Christmas when she was 5 or 6 — "the last one before my brother, Bubba, was hatched," she says. She had suffered a terrifying accident just days before the holiday: When she was playing in the yard at a friend's house, a ladder fell away from the house and hit her on the head. "I've got a picture of that Christmas morning somewhere, and I got a big old bald patch on my head, because they had to shave the top of my head for stitches," she says, laughing. "I think my parents were so happy I was alive; that's why I got everything I wanted. I remember going into that living room, and what all did I get? I got a bicycle. I got my Mary Hartline doll. Oh, my goodness, it was a bunch of stuff, and it was all too good to be true!"

By the time Deen was a mother herself, she had come to realize "you do what you have to do" to make Christmas happy for your kids. It was an annual Deen tradition to bake cookies — M&M's ones, which were set out on Christmas Eve with a glass of milk and a note for Santa and were discovered to be half-eaten the next morning. "I always tried, and so did your dad, to make it good for y'all," she recalls with a nod toward Bobby. It was no small feat, considering that Deen and her ex-husband, she says, "disagreed on one thing: everything." But looking back on his childhood holidays, Bobby assures her they did a very good job of hiding it: "I don't know how y'all did it. And now I realize you couldn't afford all the stuff we got."

But the gifts the boys received were almost overshadowed by the presents they brought their teachers, straight from their mom's legendary kitchen. "I used to make candy after candy. I would go to the dime store and get jars and send it to their teachers," Deen says. "Oh, the divinity, the buckeyes, and the coconut balls!" says Bobby. "I remember those really well." The jars were tied with beautiful ribbon, and "the teachers always looked forward to that...I always got great grades in January," he adds with a laugh.

Paula's Tree Traditions

Deen also earned a reputation for other notable holiday goings-on: There was that one year, she recalls, when all the needles fell off the tree, and it became the neighborhood's holiday spectacle, with people stopping in just to look at it and laugh — a special affront for a woman who admits to being "big-time anal about my tree." With one notable exception — there was a recent year when she let her stringent criteria for a perfect tree slip: Blame it on love. It was the first Christmas she and Groover were together — they'd been dating about four months — and she warned him that he might not want to join her expedition to find the perfect tree. It was an errand known to swallow up several hours of an afternoon. "So we pull up to the first Christmas tree stand, and I was so crazy about the man, so happy to be with him, that I walked up to the very first tree and said" — and here, she does a parody of herself, fluttering her substantial eyelashes and putting an extra dollop of honey on her Southern twang — "'It's just bee-you-ti-ful.' And he asked me if that was the one I wanted, and I said yes, and we were there all of three minutes." It was only after they got it home that she realized "that son of a gun didn't have a backside to it." Fortunately, Groover was able to wire some extra boughs to the trunk to bring it closer to Deen's expectations.

And thanks to Groover, there's a special new holiday tradition in the Deen household. She sums it up in one word — "jewwwwwwwelry" — and one gesture, extending her left hand to show off a diamond ring that most closely resembles, in size and scope, a crystal punch bowl. In fact, the couple got engaged on Christmas morning in 2002, and the USA Today version of the story might be, as Deen says, "It was the most romantical Christmas." But of course the story is a lot longer than that — and you'd have to be drinking some pretty strong eggnog to think that Deen doesn't relish the opportunity to recount it.

On her way to bed the night before, she had noticed a strange gift tucked at the back of the tree. It was about the size of a bread box and shaped like a house with one word, "Paula," written on it. In the morning, her sons and his kids convened at her house. So did Bubba and his family, as well as Groover's younger brother, plus his wife and kids. "And I thought, What is going on?" Deen recalls. She was encouraged to open that mysterious house-shaped Paula box right away. "And inside that box, there's another box surrounded by all my favorite candies like Hershey's with Almonds and Kisses," she says. "And the next box just said, 'I.' So I open that box and it, too, was holding a box surrounded by all this wonderful candy. And that box said 'Love.'" At which time, her niece Corrie pointed out that the boxes were spelling out a message; was Deen reading them? "And I said no. So I had to go back: 'Paula, I Love...' The next one said 'You.' Same thing — a smaller box inside. It said 'Will.' Next box inside that one, 'You.' Then 'Be' and 'My.' And the one that said 'Wife' held this ring and was surrounded by chocolates."

The entire time she's recounting this story, Groover sits across from her with the gentlest smile on his face. She looks at him and shakes her head and says, "I think it's so typical of him to have done all this — propose to me — without saying a word."

Sharing Her Greatest Gift

The words at this year's Christmas will likely be dominated by baby talk, as Deen's only grandchild, Jack (the child of her son Jamie and his wife, Brooke), is 2 years old now and will be more aware of the season's activities. "Last year, the bright ribbons were what attracted his eyes," she says. This year, she's planning on cooking up — and baking up — memories with him during the holidays. "It has been so long since we've had a little one in the house, and I am definitely going to cook with Jackpot. We'll be making peanut butter balls. I'm getting him an Easy Bake Oven. And I got him a miniature set of cast iron that hangs on my pot rack, just waitin' on him."

And along with that, she'll give him the beginnings of a much larger gift: the joy of cooking for others. "I love the immediate gratification of food," Deen explains. "I'm so glad I'm not a dentist. How many times does someone say, 'Oh, Doc, it felt so good when you were drilling my teeth'? Never. But when you give someone a wonderful cookie, you put a little of yourself in, and you see someone's face light up — that's immediate approval that you've done something good."